Weird Situation

First I want to thank the developers for their generosity sharing this wonderful product with the rest:
Thank you guys and Keep Up the good work !

Second I want to share a weird situation I bumped into,

Metatemplate works great on my test machine (Windows 7) but it doesn't work om my production machine *nix operation system.

My question is : Are there any specific directories I should make writable in order Metatemplate to function properly?...or anything else that I should take care of on a *nix system in order Metatemplate to work?

Re: Weird Situation

Hi gubagu,

technically there shouldn't be any difference between running this on a Win32 system or a *nix system. All my testing takes place on Mac and Linux, and it's built to be cross-platform.

I think there's likely to be other differences in your setup that are causing this. The most likely culprits are 3rd-party SEF plugins (e.g. sh404SEF, AceSEF etc), which should be placed *before* the MetaTemplate system plugin. That's because MetaTemplate needs to be able to decipher the URLs in order to run some of the rules.

There should not be any directory permissions issues - the only time MetaTemplate needs to write anything is if you use the 1-click GeoIP database downloading, or the 1-click template duplication.

What particular problems are occurring for you with the *nix installation? What part isn't working?

Cheers,
Stephen

Stephen BrandonMetaMod / Chameleon developerIf you use MetaMod or Chameleon, please post a rating and a review at the Joomla! Extensions Directory: Chameleon | MetaMod

Re: Weird Situation

Hi Stephen,

Thanks for the reply. I don't have any SEF plugins. I'll try to disable my plugins one by one to see when it was going to work. Ohh wait you asked what exactly does not work - it doesn't change the template. I thought that rule was bad then I tested it on my test server (my pc)and it worked perfectly well.
The plugin is first -90 so no other plug in is executed before it.
I will try disabling some suspected plugins and will let you know the result.

Re: Weird Situation

Hi Stephen,

I found the problem The names of my templates in the templateDetails.xml file had capital letters in between but the folder names were all lowercase. On the Winbox it didn't matter but the *nix system could not find the templ.folder ( as Template and template are seen as two different folders. When was using the ADVANCED PHP block it didn't work but I discovered later that it worked through the SUCCEED Actions. I didn't look through you code but suppose succeed actions look directly in the directory and the returns from the ADVANCED PHP look for the templ.folder based on given return case sensitive value.

I hope this feedback could help the further development of the component.

Re: Weird Situation

Hi Gugabu,

Thanks for your feedback on this. You're right - MetaTemplate uses the folder name rather than the name stated in the templateDetails.xml file. This is actually an internal Joomla thing - the place that actually sets the desired template expects to be given the folder name.

The folder name is actually shown in MetaTemplate in the list of installed templates - if the folder name is different to the name given in templateDetails.xml then the folder name is shown in brackets after the template name.

I think I need to document this a bit better...

Thanks again,
Stephen

Stephen BrandonMetaMod / Chameleon developerIf you use MetaMod or Chameleon, please post a rating and a review at the Joomla! Extensions Directory: Chameleon | MetaMod